Free The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black by Eden Unger Bowditch Page A

born.
    Two things about Faye were quite clear early in her life. First, she was, without a doubt, a striking beauty. She was always tall for her age, long and lean, with her father’s olive skin and her mother’s apple-green eyes. She looked like she might have stepped out of a painting or sculpture. She was not only considered beautiful, but exotic, her bright green eyes and dark auburn hair standing out in any New Delhi crowd, her beautiful dark skin setting her apart within her mother’s family.
    She might have embraced such attention. It might have made her feel like a queen. However, at thirteen, beauty was wholly unimportant to Faye. It had never been important, except when it got in the way. In fact, at an early age, she had found it terribly annoying when people pinched her cheeks, gawked, or otherwise displayed untoward interest in her appearance. As far back as she could remember, she resented the fact that people were impressed with something that was not her own doing. She didn’t create her beauty. She was merely stuck with it.
    The second thing evident from a very early age (and this was the one that actually mattered to her) was that Faye had a brilliant mind. And she had an extraordinary knack for building things. It was amazing what she could build—mechanicalthings, engineering things, architectural things. She was—and she would be the first to admit it—a genius. From her earliest moments, Faye loved to experiment with devices. She loved to make things with gears and pulleys and springs. When she was three and a half, she took parts from her father’s bicycle and built an electric fan.
    (By coincidence, seven thousand kilometers away in London, a boy named Jasper Modest had done the same thing from parts of his toy boat.)
    At the time, Faye had been given full reign of the family laboratory. This did not sit well with her father’s assistants, but they never complained or fussed, for two reasons: One, it was an honor to be chosen as an assistant to Professor Vigyanveta, and two, there was a long line of would-be assistants waiting to replace those who chose to complain about conditions.
    That said, there were reasons why the young lads working in the laboratory felt disgruntled. A woman, let alone a little girl, was an odd and unwanted sight in a science lab, and this particular girl was arrogant and annoying. After all, her mother was not only a scientist, but also an American, and everyone knew what those Americans were like. Still, they put up with the fact that a gorgeous little girl was measurably more intelligent than all of them put together.
    At the age of six, Faye created a contraption that had many gears and pulleys and springs, all attached to an assortment of different-sized hooks. (The myriad items that were sacrificed for this invention are too numerous to be mentioned individually, but their loss in the name of science is duly noted.) The invention could pick up beakers and move them around the laboratory bythe mere touch of a lever. Admittedly, this particular invention was not one of Faye’s most successful. Her parents had been quite encouraging before they knew the quantity of things that would be cannibalized for the creation. After several mishaps in which lab assistants were hauled around the room at the end of assorted hooks and a rather nasty explosion that was the result of improperly combined chemicals tipped accidentally from a flying beaker, the Vigyanvetas had to lay out a new set of rules.
    Faye’s parents wanted to give their daughter every opportunity to exercise her talents. They also wanted to protect their belongings from overly capable little hands. So, they had a special table, just her size, built for their daughter, placed on the far, far side of the lab so she could do her own work and, more important to them, not interfere with theirs. Faye was no longer provided unlimited access to her parents’ equipment, but she was still allowed to wander around,